Shellac is an excretion from the Lac beetle that helps them stick to the trees they like to live on. In addition to the wood finish products an edible form of shellac is what makes your apples shine and makes the hard candy shell around many candies like Skittles and such

Plenty of other horrifying things we eat and don't think about, so I'm not afraid of a little aspartame!

"Aspartame is not only sweeter than sucrose, but is preferable as a food to sucrose. While sucrose can provide the body with little more than energy, aspartame is composed of amino acids, the building blocks of body proteins, and like other proteins is broken down by the digestive enzymes in the stomach to its constituent amino acids thus providing nutritive value."

There are people that didn't know this? Sucralose is also like one hydrogen atom away from being antifreeze. If you really want to give a chemist an aneurism, go around claiming sucralose is harmful because its compound is similar to poison.